They just wanted to be there.” The final game and hoopla were televised across nine Midwestern states for all the fans who couldn’t score a ticket. They didn’t know who they were for, and they didn’t even care. “They’re the people that bought their tickets far in advance so they could have a seat. “The thing that made the girls’ tournament so unusual was what I always called the marginal audience,” said Cooley. “It was something Meredith Wilson could have done a great musical about-girls’ basketball,” said Jim Zabel, who began covering Iowa girls’ basketball for WHO radio in the 1940s, in More Than a Game. Men in tuxedos elegantly swept the court at halftime. By 1955, an elaborate parade of champions introduced all the players of the tournament to sold-out crowds in Veterans Memorial Auditorium-which held almost 16,000 people-with a background of pop music, light shows, dancers, and bands. At the annual weeklong state tournament in Des Moines, called the Sweet Sixteen because only the 16 top teams regardless of school size would compete, one exceptional player was crowned queen. Sterling has been doing research and collecting oral histories on the game, working with the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa.Ĭertainly there were other girls’ high school sports being played in Iowa-track, volleyball, softball. “They had the market cornered,” says Jennifer Sterling, a lecturer in the department of American Studies at the University of Iowa and a speaker on girls’ 6-on-6 basketball for Humanities Iowa. While boys and girls played 5-on-5, full-court basketball around the country, the 6-on-6 girls’ game dominated high school sports in Iowa. Girls’ basketball was different from boys’: The girls played a type of half-court game with three forwards and three guards on each side who could not cross the center line, could have only two dribbles, and had three seconds to pass or shoot the ball. Wayne Cooley, the head of the Iowa Girls High School Athletic Union from 1954 to 2002, in an interview for More Than a Game: 6 on 6 Basketball in Iowa, which aired on Iowa Public Television in 2008. “I thoroughly believed whatever sport it was, if you surrounded the Iowa girl with respect and prestige, she will in turn give to the viewing audience the very best and finest performance her ability will allow,” said E. The idea that girls-who worked hard daily on their family farms-were too delicate to play sports wasn’t considered. The first official state tournament was held in 1920, made up of teams of rural players whose families and small towns supported their athletic achievements with enthusiasm and pride. Since the early 1900s, girls’ basketball has been played in Iowa. Title IX, which was passed by Congress in 1972, would also change the rules, dynamics, and celebrity culture that had set Iowa girls’ basketball apart for most of the twentieth century. It wasn’t that Iowa girls were playing less, but everyone else was playing more, their access to sports forever changed by federal law.
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